Mamdani-style public grocery stores are coming to Toronto—eventually
City council wants to sell you bread
The City of Toronto wants to get into the grocery business, council decided today.
Taking a page from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Toronto will look into opening four non-profit, city-run grocery stores, which would sell staple goods at prices lower than those of grocery giants like Loblaws and Sobeys.
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According to the motion put forward by Councillor Anthony Perruzza, the city would open four grocery stores, one for each of Etobicoke, North York, downtown and Scarborough, and in low-income areas where fresh groceries are hard to come by.
As not-for-profits, the stores would keep markups on foodstuffs to an absolute minimum. The city is also considering exempting them from expenses like property taxes and development charges, savings that could then be passed on to consumers. In theory, these aspects of the city-run model would keep prices lower at these stores than their private, for-profit competitors.
Related: Could city-run grocers be the answer to Toronto’s high food costs?
Council was near-unanimous in its support of the idea, with the sole exception of Councillor Stephen Holyday—a man with a reputation for going it alone against popular proposals. “I don’t think the government could possibly run this more efficiently than the private sector does,” he said during the debate, reports journalist Matt Elliott on Bluesky.
City staff also threw some cold water on the proposal, with a financial impact report noting that no money yet exists in the city’s budget to open new grocery stores, and that doing so could cost quite a lot indeed. To make it work, the city would have to acquire buildings, buy refrigerators and set up entirely new supply chains, staff pointed out, and it’s unclear what all that would cost.
Creating a brand new grocer is no small task, and the city has given itself a while to figure it all out. City staff aren’t due to report back with a plan until spring 2027, a whole year from now, and actual implementation would only happen sometime after that. Unfortunately for our checkbooks, grocery stores are slow-growing fruits.
Anthony Milton is a freelance journalist based in Toronto specializing in long-form magazine writing. He previously worked as an assistant editor at Toronto Life, where he launched the Front Row newsletter. He regularly contributes all sorts of stories to the magazine, including deep dives on sports, business and housing as well as short-form commentary on our ever-changing city, from its obsession with cherry blossoms to its maddening NIMBYism. His work has also appeared in Maclean’s, Ricochet, TVO, the Trillium and more.
